This version of Peter Rubens's "The Calydonian Boar Hunt" dates from about 1611-12 and is in the collection of the Getty Center in California. (Photo: Getty)

A week after recovering a version of 17th-century master Peter Paul Rubens's The Calydonian Boar Hunt that was stolen from a Belgian museum in 2001, Greek authorities confirmed that they had charged the couple who were in possession of the painting with money laundering.

The two suspects are a 64-year-old man and a 40-year-old woman, according to the Associated Press. It is not yet clear how they came to obtain the painting, which had been plucked from the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent, Belgium, in 2001, by three masked bandits.

At the press conference, the director of the Greek National Gallery of Art, Marina Lambraki-Plaka, described the two as "amateurs," and noted that they had actually left the original Ghent museum identification sticker on the back of the painting.

As The Observer reported earlier this summer, the majority of stolen artwork is not recovered. Though New York police have named a suspect who they believe is behind the theft of fashion entrepreneur Marc Ecko's KAWS painting, the mustachioed man and the artwork, which some say is work as much as $100,000, remain at large.

Five years ago this month, one of the deadliest hurricanes in U.S. history swept through Louisiana and Mississippi. An exhibition opening Aug. 28 (a day before the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina) at the New Orleans Museum of Art puts a score of photos documenting the tragedy up on the walls. They were all snapped with a digital pocket camera by noted photographer Richard Misrach in the days and weeks following the hurricane. The show, dubbed "exhibitionUNTITLED [New Orleans and the Gulf Coast 2005]," melds a focus on graffiti and street art with fine-art photography. While there are no people in the pictures, the exhibition nonetheless calls up raw emotion and human sorrow with its images of homemade magic-marker signs and spray-painted messages scrawled on dilapidated buildings, fences, cars and trucks.

These messages range from the gut wrenching-"Destroy this memory"-to the cautionary: "Don't Try-I am sleeping inside with a big dog, an ugly woman and two shotguns." The exhibition is meant to give Katrina's victims, said Mr. Misrach, "an unmediated voice, heard in a way that I haven't seen before." The American photographer is best known for producing major series, such as the vividly colored landscape suite "Desert Cantos" and a series on the Mississippi industrial area dubbed "Cancer Alley." His photos are in the collection of more than 50 U.S. museums.

"It is always important when a celebrated contemporary artist ... drops [his] work and rushes to the aid of such a calamity," said NOMA curator of photography Diego Cortez.

Far from random, the order of the exhibition is no accident-Mr. Misrach deliberately arranged the project in a narrative that follows "the profound range of emotions and responses" felt by victims, he wrote in an email exchange with The Observer. These emotions range from fear, to defiance ("Hey Katrina! That's all you got? You big sissy!!! We will be back!!!"), to anger, to mourning, to hope, to raw pleas for relief. After the three months Mr. Misrach spent in New Orleans photographing these messages, he came away with a single conclusion. "New Orleans is remarkably vital and resilient," the photographer said.

Mr. Misrach's Katrina photographs were printed in editions of five and complete sets were given to NOMA, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The Houston museum is also showing the photographs in an exhibition that runs through Oct. 31.

The exhibitions are meant to serve as a stark reminder, and a necessary one, that the aftermath of Katrina is still very much a part of everyday life in New Orleans. Mr. Misrach said he's been amazed that "the rest of the world had already forgotten."

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For latecomers to this debacle, which has sent shock waves through museum circles the country over, it should be recalled that on June 25, Mr. Rogers announced his plans for what was called "an organizational restructuring" of the M.F.A., designed to meet the needs of a new strategic plan. What these plans would entail was made immediately apparent when 18 members of the museum staff-including two senior curators-were fired on the spot. The curators marked for termination-Jonathan Fairbanks, with 28 years of experience as the curator of the M.F.A.'s Department of American Decorative Arts, and Ann Poulet, with 20 years as the museum's curator of European Decorative Arts-were promptly taken by security guards to the personnel office, where they were obliged to hand over their keys and museum passes and told to clean out their offices and be out of the building by 3 P.M. As severance compensations, they were reportedly offered the minimum the law requires.

This brutal treatment seems also to have been accompanied by a good deal of unconscionable dissimulation. According to a page 1 report in The Beacon Hill/Back Bay Chronicle , a Boston weekly, on Aug. 31, "At the time of the dismissal, the curators were told that the positions were being abolished by vote of the trustees. However, within the month, Jeffrey Munger, who offered his resignation as associate curator of European Decorative Arts, was told he would be offered the [European Decorative Arts] curatorship. He declined, citing dismay over the drift of curatorial affairs over the past five years [of Mr. Rogers' tenure as director]. Three positions were cut, which would have hampered its work severely, he added."

What is also interesting about this story is that we are also told that some trustees of the museum weren't even informed about the planned dismissals until the closing minutes of the meeting at which the announcement of the "restructuring" was decided upon. All of which gives Mr. Rogers and his press office a measure of credibility in the Janet Reno and Bill Clinton class.

Nor have Mr. Rogers' supporters in the Boston business community hesitated to suppress dissenting opinions on his "glorious decisions." The Beacon Hill/Back Bay Chronicle also reported the case of Patricia Hills, a professor of American art history at Boston University, who wrote a letter to the M.F.A. protesting the dismantling of its departments devoted to American art. That was promptly followed by a letter to Jon Westling, the president of Boston University, demanding that he take some action against Professor Hills for writing such a letter to the M.F.A. That letter is reported to have been written by Barbara Warren, an employee of Crosby Advisors, part of Fidelity Investments, whose head, Edward Johnson, is an honorary trustee of the M.F.A., and whose wife, Elizabeth, is head of the museum's collections committee.

Much to President Westling's credit, he responded to Barbara Warren's attempted reprisal as follows: "Boston University is not, as you put it, a 'public institution,' but a private university. We do not censor our faculty members' mail or attempt to control their expressions of opinion.… On the question of whether a university should 'countenance' a faculty member in art history expressing views ('criticizing and second-guessing') about the policies of the Museum of Fine Arts, I must admit that your objection astonishes me. You may disagree with Professor Hills' professional judgment, but to object to her right to express that judgment is surely counter to the spirit that ought to animate both universities and art museums."

Unfortunately, it is clearly no longer the spirit that animates the M.F.A. under its current directorship. As for what has animated the M.F.A.'s board of trustees in the course of this debacle, The Beacon Hill/Back Bay Chronicle quoted one of them as follows: "Malcolm has done a great job; he's livened the museum up and put it in the black … These visitors, eat, buy in the shop," etc.

Well, what else would you want from a museum of fine arts these days? So long as the tables are crowded in the restaurant and sales show a nice profit in the shops, what more is wanted from a museum director? And isn't it the whole point of crowd-pleasing exhibitions of the sort that Malcolm Rogers boasts of that they bring people in to spend their money?

Museum jobs being what they are and human nature being what it is, I have no doubt that Mr. Rogers will be successful in staffing his new Strategic Plan Museum with an appropriate roster of like-minded curators. But the public should understand that the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston is now a deeply compromised institution.